Some of you may have seen West Dorset's Sea Spring Seeds on Gardeners' World on BBC Two recently, so we caught up with the experts behind the specialist seed company.

The West Bexington chilli nursery is owned by Joy and Michael Michaud who have been growing chillies for more than 30 years.

They have been in West Bexington since 1989 and started off as a market garden selling vegetables and in the early 90s, started a company called Peppers by Post selling fresh chillies.

Joy said: "Because we wanted to have a really hot one, we discovered the Dorset Naga, which was, for a while, the world's hottest chilli, and of course everybody wanted seeds of that and that's how Sea Spring Seeds started, about 15 years ago now.

"We have way over 100 varieties of chillies, many of which we have bred ourselves."

Joy and Michael both have PHDs in agriculture agronomy, so wanted to grow.

"You're not going to make money on a small piece of land unless you have a niche and chillies are ours," Joy added.

"Chillies are lovely plants. I can't think of another vegetable that's got so much variety, so much colour, so much interest."

How many varieties of seeds and chillies you have bred yourselves do you have?

They have around 120 to 130 different varieties of seeds that they sell.

"In terms of ones we have bred, that's difficult," said Joy. "Some we've actively bred, we've made crosses and we've made selections and it's taken us up to 10 years sometimes.

"Other times we've been given something from a shop, someone's travels or an allotment and then we've taken it, adapted it and developed it - it's still quite a lot of work but I wouldn't say we've bred them, but it's still unique to us.

"There's maybe 10 we've bred and maybe 10 or 20 we have developed - but that's a complete guess."

How did the filming for Gardeners' World come about?

Joy normally has a display at Royal Horticultural Shows and was booked to do the Malvern Spring Show last year in May with a display of salads. Organisers recommended Joy to the BBC for them to film in the lead up to the show, but it was unfortunately cancelled.

However, the team still came to the farm to film in the summer when the chillies were looking their best.

What response have you had from appearing?

"We were hoping it would go out in February because the season for sowing chillies is January, February and March - late April is really too late for sowing chillies," Joy said.

"Our orders have really spikes, The first few orders we got in I emailed them saying 'it's really too late to be sowing chilli seeds, do you really want to buy them?' and they all said 'yes', but after that hundreds of orders came in.

"We also sell chilli plug plants and we take orders in autumn and spring, but only send out in April and May. That would have been perfect for customers to buy except orders have been really up and we reached our peak."

Due to the demand they had to stop taking orders and close the website down.

"It's been quite surprising," she added.

What is your mildest chilli?

"We do have some really beautiful hot ones but we've got a lot of wonderful mild chillies, some of them are so mild you can barely tell they are chillies.

"The definition between a chilli pepper and a sweet pepper is whether they've got the chemical (capsaicin) and it's measured in Scoville heat units and the Naga one is one million. To most people, a hot chilli will be around 30,000.

"Some of our chillies are just 100 or 1,000, which are so mild. We've got one Biquinho red and one Biquinho yellow and they are like teardrops. We've got a couple which are called seasoning peppers, which is the same flavour as a Scotch Bonnet, really fragrant, but almost no heat - one's called Bellaforma and one's called Apricot.

"Another, a Mexican chilli, called Poblano, it's got a really, really rich, almost chocolatey flavour, it's absolutely delicious.

"Those are the mildest and all under 1,000, which is extremely mild.

"We've got several under 5,000, which are also very nice, and at that stage you can just tell there's a bit of feeling but you are not put off by them.

"Unless people are allergic to peppers, I would say we've got a chilli for everybody."

Is the Dorset Naga the hottest chilli you have?

"It's one of the hottest. Anything around one million plus is called a superhot and we sell seeds of four superhots.

"When chillies are tested for heat, you get a snapshot of the fruit that is tested, but in each variety there is always going to be a range - stage of ripeness, time of year, light levels, water levels will all affect how hot the fruit are on that plant. Different plants of the same variety will vary a bit so you can never say that a chilli variety is that heat, you say that when it was measured it was that heat.

"Out of the superhots we sell, I would hesitate to say that one was hotter than the other. I will say that out of the four, Dorset Naga has been measured the hottest. We've measured it at 1.3 million at one time, but the BBC measured it at 1.6 million another time.

"Two of them we have developed, one's called Dorset Zinger and one's called Bengle Naga and the fourth one is a well-known one called Moruga Scorpion, which is from Trinidad."

What advice would you give to people wanting to grow their own chillies?

"Chillies are different to other vegetables because people who are not growers will grow chillies. They make beautiful house plants, so even if you haven't got a garden and have a sunny windowsill, you can grow a chilli."

Joy advises people to choose a variety to suit their needs - how hot they want it and the size of the plant.

"There's no point growing a chilli that is too mild for your tastes or too hot for your tastes, so do a bit of research to find varieties.

"Chillies vary enormously in size. There's no pint growing a plant that's going to be tiny if you want to put it in your polytunnel and no point growing a big plant if you've only got a small windowsill."

One Dorset Naga they grew, called 'Nigel', reached eight feet and they were able to pick nearly 2,500 chillies off the one plant. They gave the plant to Groves Nurseries. You can watch a clip about Nigel at the top of this page.

"The other advice I can give is to sow early, not late April - January, February and maybe March. Once you've sown them, chilli plants need warmth and light; light is just as important as warmth and if one of those is lacking, they won't do well."

The nursery in West Bexington is not open to visitors and although the time for sowing chilli seeds has passed this year, seed and plants can be bought on Sea Spring Seed's website for next year.

You can also find a large variety of vegetable seeds on the website and keep up to date at Sea Spring Seed's Facebook page.

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